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Tagged: 3d printer

OpenSCAD is pretty popular amongst the 3D Printering community. You can design your 3D modles using a meta language that describes what you are trying to build. Frustrated with some of the methodoligies that OpenSCAD implements, Bluebie created Oozby.

While I can’t say that I’m much of a Ruby person, I’d much rather prefer using Python variants like SolidPython or pySCAD I can appreciate the goal to make technology more accessible to other people with different backgrounds.

Following the same idea as this previous post, it I stumbled on this company that has the same concept for turning your 3D Printer into a low power laser cutter/engraver. They appear to actually have a kit ready to go now which seems to focus primarily on the old Makerbot thing-o-matic, but I’m sure can be adapted to other designs.

The laser is mounted in front of the plastic extruder, and the 2 watt laser driver board is tied to the motor on/off signal from the existing electronics. From there a little special G code is required to get it going .

Check out a video of it cutting 1/32″ wood with a 445nm Blu Ray laser after the break.

Think your iPhone 5S TouchID is secure? Think again. The biometrics hacking team of the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) has successfully bypassed the biometric security of Apple’s TouchID using the How to fake a fingerprints? process they wrote about back in 2004.

“First, the fingerprint of the enroled user is photographed with 2400 dpi resolution. The resulting image is then cleaned up, inverted and laser printed with 1200 dpi onto transparent sheet with a thick toner setting. Finally, pink latex milk or white woodglue is smeared into the pattern created by the toner onto the transparent sheet. After it cures, the thin latex sheet is lifted from the sheet, breathed on to make it a tiny bit moist and then placed onto the sensor to unlock the phone. This process has been used with minor refinements and variations against the vast majority of fingerprint sensors on the market.”

Nothing good could ever come from storing your fingerprints on your smartphone. Just don’t do it people! You can read more about the iPhone 5s TouchID Hack here.

Not in the mood for some video game coasters? Well did you know there are more places to get 3D models to print for your 3D Printer other than Thingiverse ? There’s Defcad which commonly has all those items that people are forced to take down other places, and Yeggi which seems to just scour the web hunting models. If you are making industrial designs like PCB layout, there’s 3dcontentcentral. That should get you going.

You’ve obviously heard of FFT or Fast Fourier Transform, you have it on your trusty O’Scope and when you look at it, you think you see valuable information. But what exactly is a Fourier Transform? Check out the interactive guide to Fourier Transform so you can learn something.

Looking for somewhere to host your software project, not a fan of GitHub? Srchub is just starting out, but offers subversion, git, mercurial, wiki, issue tracker. Lets you assign multiple collaborators and also make private repositories. Not a bad gig for free.

You JavaScript/Node.js guys have probably seen the Espruino microcontroller. A micro that can be developed using JavaScript. But did you know there is another one ? The Tessel. This one’s got on-board wi-fi.

While 3D tv’s didn’t seem to take off, 3D printing sure has. And once thing leads to another. Now 3D Scanning is getting kind of hot. There’s a project on Kickstarter that is promoting a 3D Scanner for use on mobile devices. It can also do regular USB so it can be used on other devices or home-brew applications as well.

The device seems to be battery-powered, and uses infra-red LEDs and a camera to measure distance and scan. The range is 40 cm to 3.5 meters and promotes an accuracy of 1%. The current things demonstrated are a room scanner app that lets you take dimensions of a room by panning the camera around. An object scanner that can let you make a 3D model (for use in CAD or 3D Printing). And a virtual reality game.

Cool technology, it just means that this type of stuff is getting closer to being a cheap commodity for regular users.

You already know that GitHub is pretty awesome for hosting your source files, but how about your 3D object STL files ? Awhile back they added a 3D file viewer to give you live previews of your 3D objects. Now they’ve added the capability to see the differences between revisions.

When you compare 2 versions, one object is in green, one is red. Then there is a slider to let you transition between the old version and the new version. This method of comparing 3D models is much better than doing a side by side comparison, as sometimes the difference is so slight.

Printing with plastic like PLA and ABS is cool, or even something more unique like Nylon or Tglas… but people are always looking for more. In Johnathan’s case, he wanted to print in clay. Novel idea. This brings all sorts of ideas to potters.

The design is based on of a delta style 3D Printer, and uses MDF, plastic and steel rods with linear bearings. On the electronics side its a set from Fabster3D which is a RAMPS board and runs a modified Marlin firmware. The print head uses clay cartridges that extrude out of compressed air at about 30 psi. The clay extrudes out at about 1mm per second.

Check out the full writeup on Johnathan’s site. More pictures and video after the break.